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Biographical note
Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922. Educated by Jesuit brothers in Lowell, he decided to become a writer at age seventeen and developed his own writing style, which he called 'spontaneous prose'. He used this technique to record the life of the American 'traveler' and the experiences of the Beat Generation, most memorably in On the Road and also in The Subterraneans and The Dharma Bums. His other works include Big Sur, Desolation Angels, Lonesome Traveler, Visions of Gerard, Tristessa, and a book of poetry called Mexico City Blues. Jack Kerouac died in 1969.<p>The most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the<br />generation Kerouac himself named years ago as "beat"</p>
The New York Times
Pop writing at its best. It changed the way I saw the world, making me yearn for fresh experience
- Hanif Kureishi, Independent on Sunday
<i>On the Road</i> sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso machines, and also sent countless kids on the road
- William Burroughs,
Jack Kerouac's Great American Novel, now in a delightful new Clothbound Classics edition
On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.